Celebrating Filipino Books And Authors

...Filipino authors have forged ahead, with or without champions in the so-called mainstream publishing world.

And plans are afoot to celebrate their work.

The first Filipino American International Book Festival will be held next year in October at the San Francisco Public Library. The event sponsors include the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco, the San Francisco Public Library, and the Literacy Initiatives International Foundation’s Books for Life Project.

“We intend the book fest to not just be a sales event for books, like most other attempts at promoting Filipino books here,” writer and author Gemma Nemenzo, one of the festival organizers, told me.

“It will be an Experience. We'll have culinary talks and demos, food for sale, workshops on writing and getting published, storytelling for kids, traditional alternative therapies like hilot.”

The festival hopes to draw more attention to Filipino books, and to get Filipinos in the United States and elsewhere interested in these works.

“Did you know that for 2009 alone, the Philippine publishing industry came out with 6,000 new titles?” Gemma added. “And how many even reached US soil. Not even a hundred.”